> But surplus-value does exist, even if the unconscious does not. We
> know this because otherwise there is no way of explaining profit, so
> even if it is just 'saving the phenomena' as physicists say of
> trickery like Einstein's cosmological constant, which prove
> necessary to make the rest of an important theory stay up on its
> hind legs, we need surplus-value.
mark, of all people, ought not to give any kind of comfort to the enemy.
( stuff inside '[ ]' embedded in quotes is me.... )
The cosmological constant stuff was tacked on by Einstein as an afterthought a year after his initial paper on general relativity published in 1916. And of course three of the great experimental confirmations of his theory, perihelion precession of Mercury [immediate], bending of starlight around the sun [1920], and gravitational redshift from massive stars [1914 - 1920 and beyond (see note 2.)], need not the cosmological parameter to stand on their hind legs and roar.
However, in 1917 he fretted so:
"It is to be emphasized, however, that a positive curvature of space is given by our results, even if the supplementary term [dat dang cosmological constant] is not introduced. That term [dat dang ...] is necessary only for the purpose of making possible a quasi-static distribution of matter, as required by the fact of the small velocities of the stars."
In other words, this was before the experimental evidence of the red-shift from young starlight and before Lemaitre showed there were valid solutions to the Einstein equations which fit __this__ observational reality. For Einstein's equations gave the universe a dynamic quality on grand scales: stuff like spacetime curvature, which gave a meaning to a radius of the universe, became a time-varying parameter subject to the distribution of mass and energy distributed throughtout all space. Thus he played with a term in his equations which would tend to dampen out these uppity variations: the famous Lambda.
Misner, Thorne and Wheel (MTW) (the big black book on Gravitation) have this take on Einstein's "the biggest blunder of my life":
"In 1915, when Einstein developed his general relativity theory, the permanence of the universe was a fixed item of belief in Western philosophy. "The heavens endure from everlasting to everlasting." Thus, it disturbed Einstein greatly to discover that his geometrodynamic law G = 8 pi T [relation between spacetime curvature "tensor" G and mass-energy "tensor" T -- the general relativistic extension to Newton's masterpiece] ] predicts a non-permanent universe; a dynamic universe; a universe that originated in a big-bang explosion or will be destroyed eventually by contraction to infinite density, or both. Faced with this contradiction between his theory and the firm philosophical beliefs of the day, Einstein weakened; he modified his theory."
He weakened, but not for long. Here's Pauli (a critic of Einstein's views on Quantum Thoery) in followup Notes (1956) to his own childhood opus "Theory of Relativity" (first written when he was 21! in 1921):
"Since the first publication of this book an important development has occurred. New solutions of Einstein's field equations describing a world homogeneous in space, with a time-dependent metric have been found by A. Friedmann [1922, 1924]. They also exist without Einstein's cosmological term [math detail omitted] for all three cases of positive, zero, and negative constant curvature of the three-dimensional space. These solutions have been applied for the first time to the actual universe by G. Lemaitre [1927]. He also showed that Einstein's static solution is unstable with respect to a time variation of the density of matter. [in other words, the thing Einstein tacked on was like, to paraphrase MTW's words 'a pencil standing up on its end by itself'.] The application of these solutions to the actual universe became possible by Hubble's discovery of a red shift of the spectral lines emitted by nebulae. which is proportional to their distance. This cannot well be interpreted other than as a Doppler shift due to a velocity of the nebulae in the sense of an expansion of the whole system of matter.
Einstein was soon aware of these new possibilities and COMPLETELY REJECTED THE COSMOLOGICAL TERM as superfluous and no longer justified. I fully accept this new standpoint of Einstein's [1931, 1945]."
Einstein was a piece of work, wasn't he? In 1905 he unified Maxwell's equations of electromagnetism with kinematics and dynamics of solid bodies, based in part on experimental suggestions that the aether wasn't nowhere, no-how, though his most trustworthy biographer Abraham Pais (Silent is the Lord: The Life and Times of Albert Einstein) makes a strong case for the possibility that Einstein was not so motivated by Michelson's experimental results but rather was looking for a more elegant formulation of all classical mechanics and electromagnetism. So he tossed out Galilean relativity for his own brand, in order to save Maxwell but give philosophers a headache. (That is, he resolved the conflict between Galilean relativity and Maxwell by tossing the former on its ear.)
Then he comes back 11 years later and on the strength of a day dream about people falling down elevator shafts and exclaiming 'look momma, no gravity!!!', reformulates Newton's artwork into this space-time thingy. Then follows a triple of experimental support. But, to cover his ass, he fiddles with his equations to make some kind of phony harmony between his new gravitation and whatever smartass said everything stays the same. When material conditions evolved to the point that people were spending their days counting galaxies and their red-shifts in the night sky in a careful way, theoreticians enjoined Einstein's masterpiece with experimental results, and Einstein dropped the cosmological term faster than a duck's back rolls off a water drop.
The cosmological term makes its re-appearance every now and then, only to be re-tossed as theory and measurement are refined. There are some speculative suggestions that it could come into play yet again upon the marriage of quantum field theory with relativity -- for example, the so-called vacuum polarization creates an "zero-point energy" throughout all space and this new mass-energy term __might__ then need to be balanced by a cosmological constant (Zel'dovich 1967).
But that marriage proposal is for a struggle which lays ahead of us yet.
les 'i aint afraid a no Lambda' schaffer
notes:
1.) i had my first ever shot of Lagavulin yesterday. it's supreme: a woody, BBQ aroma that lingers on the roof of the mouth for five or more seconds after tipping the shot glass back.
2.) I didn't know this until tonite, but redshift of spectral lines from the sun were first suspected back in 1896. The dates 1914-1920 represent first attempts at verifying the shift's magnitude (they were small) and attempts at explaining them via Einstein. Studies of the companion star to Sirius, which produces a redshift 30 times that of the sun due to its greater density and size, yielded an even stronger confirmation of the redshift prediction of Einstein's theory. This was in the early 1950's. Experiments by Pound and Rebka [1959], observing photons rising in a 22.5 meter helium filled tube placed in a vertical shaft at Harvard, nailed this prediction down to four decimal place accuracy ... and sans cosmological constant.